Singapore’s central bank yesterday said it has penalized several top global financial institutions, including Citibank and Swiss lender UBS, for breaches linked to the nation’s biggest money laundering case.
Ten people from China’s Fujian Province, who had different, non-Chinese passports, had been convicted and jailed in Singapore in the S$3 billion (US$2.4 billion) money laundering case, which is reportedly among the biggest such cases in the world.
They used Singapore’s financial system to launder illicit proceeds from multi-country gambling, police said.
Photo: Reuters
Following the arrests in 2023, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), launched extensive “supervisory examinations” into financial institutions “with nexus to persons of interest” in the case.
The MAS said it had completed its probe and imposed penalties totaling S$27.45 million on nine financial institutions for breaches in anti-money laundering safeguards.
Among those penalized were Credit Suisse Singapore Branch for S$5.8 million, local lender United Overseas Bank (UOB) for S$5.6 million, the Singapore branch of UBS AG for S$3.0 million, and Citibank NA Singapore and Citibank Singapore Ltd for S$2.6 million.
The Singapore branch of Bank Julius Baer was also penalized S$2.4 million, while three more financial institutions rounded up the rest of the penalties.
Credit Suisse collapsed in March 2023, prompting its acquisition by rival UBS.
“The breaches arose out of poor or inconsistent implementation of these [anti-money laundering] policies and controls,” the MAS said in a statement.
The shortcomings included inadequate customer risk assessment and failure to detect or follow up on certain “red flags” detected in documents that should have cast doubt on some of their clients’ sources of wealth, it said.
Eight of the institutions “failed to adequately review relevant transactions flagged as suspicious by their own systems,” it added.
“The relevant transactions were unusually large, inconsistent with the customers’ profiles or showed unusual patterns,” it said.
The MAS also banned four people from doing business in the industry for between three and six years, and issued reprimands to five more people, as part of the actions it had taken.
UOB in a statement said that “we acknowledge and accept MAS’ findings with regard to the identified areas for improvement,” adding that over the past two years, it had implemented measures to address deficiencies.
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